APA style

Be pre­cise in the use of words and expect pre­ci­sion from oth­ers. — Pierre Abelard

Hawaii Pacific Uni­ver­sity has selected the Pub­li­ca­tion Man­ual of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion (5th edi­tion) as the style and for­mat­ting stan­dard in its graduate-level pro­grams and courses, includ­ing the MSIS and MBA.

The 6th edi­tion of the Pub­li­ca­tion Man­ual was released on 1 July 2009. I’ve got a copy, and I’ll be updat­ing this page with new infor­ma­tion. This new edi­tion has a blue cover, and asks users to include the DOI (dig­i­tal object iden­ti­fier) for jour­nals and books where available.

There are more than a few erros in the 6th edi­tion man­ual. This link is a PDF file that lists and cor­rects the errors:

http://supp.apa.org/style/pubman-reprint-corrections-for-2e.pdf

See the APA web site for more infor­ma­tion and Remem­ber that the Pub­li­ca­tion Man­ual is the best source for infor­ma­tion. Stu­dents should buy their own copy of the man­ual and use it dur­ing their aca­d­e­mic program.

I rec­om­mend the spiral-bound ver­sion, which is avail­able from the APA online store and at Amazon.com. This ver­sion lays flat, unlike the uni­ver­sity bookstore’s paper­back ver­sion. Of course, one could buy the paper­back edi­tion and have it rebound at a copy­ing or office sup­ply store.

• APA updated guide­lines on cit­ing and list­ing elec­tronic ref­er­ences. Some of these guide­lines have changed since the 5th edi­tion was pub­lished, so check this page. This includes a June 2007 pub­li­ca­tion that addresses email, Web pages, blogs, com­ments, YouTube.
• Errata for the 5th edi­tion of the APA Pub­li­ca­tion Man­ual. There were some typo­graph­i­cal and con­tent errors in the ini­tial print­ings of the man­ual. This is a good doc­u­ment to print and place inside your manual.

I check writ­ten assign­ments in my courses for APA com­pli­ance. APA for­mat­ting helps stu­dents write assign­ments that are easy for me to read and understand.

Usage of the APA man­ual also offers good lessons in the fine art of RTFM (read­ing the fine man­ual). As a man­ager or employee, you may be expected to write doc­u­ments that con­form to your organization’s style manual.

If you’re really lucky, you may have to select or write your organization’s style man­ual. This may be more karma than you need.

Evi­dence of care­ful APA for­mat­ting also indi­cates to me that the stu­dent has paid atten­tion to the assign­ment require­ments, and didn’t try to write their assign­ment at the last minute.

There­fore, I some­times return poorly writ­ten or for­mat­ted assign­ments with­out a grade.

Here are some links on APA for­mat­ting. Stu­dents may use these sites as needed to sup­ple­ment the course materials.

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My own APA for­mat­ting guides

• (PDF) I used this table when I’m grad­ing papers. It has exam­ples and page ref­er­ences that help me find sec­tions in the 5th edi­tion of the APA manual.
• (PPT) This was a slide show that I used in class when I dis­cussed the APA/5 for­mat­ting requirements
• (PDF) Here are some exam­ple APA/5 cita­tions for an aca­d­e­mic jour­nal arti­cle. This doc­u­ment focuses on how to cite arti­cles found in EBSCO, includ­ing the “per­sis­tent link”. Note that the 6th edi­tion rec­om­mends using DOI num­bers when­ever pos­si­ble, and doesn’t require using a com­plete URL. I usu­ally ask my stu­dents for a com­plete URL so I can look up their arti­cles and references.

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• West­ern Michi­gan Uni­ver­sity has guides to APA, Chicago, MLA and Tura­bian for­mat­ting at Guide to Writ­ing Styles
• The HPU Tutor­ing and Test­ing Cen­ter has a page of APA resources, includ­ing tuto­ri­als and guides.
• (PDF) HPU Library Guide 19 has an excel­lent dis­cus­sion on aca­d­e­mic hon­esty and plagiarism.
• This guide from Wooster Uni­ver­sity is helpful.
• Plonsky’s APA guide is an excel­lent resource with many exam­ples of impor­tant APA for­mat­ting rules.
• Dou­glas Degel­man and Mar­tin Har­ris run an excel­lent site on APA for­mat­ting.
  • Degel­man & Har­ris’ APA tem­plate for Microsoft Word
  • Exam­ple of an under­grad­u­ate research pro­posal for psy­chol­ogy majors. MSIS stu­dents may find this help­ful for cap­stone projects that involve exper­i­ments or human subjects.
  • Exam­ple of APA title page.
  • Exam­ple of APA abstract page.
  • Exam­ple of APA for­mat­ted headings.
• Les­ley university’s web site on APA style
  • (PDF) My doc­u­ment sum­ma­riz­ing the Les­ley Uni­ver­sity doc­u­ment below, with addi­tional instruc­tions for MSIS students.
  • (PDF) Lesley’s University’s 2002 PDF doc­u­ment on anno­tated bibliographies.

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Web ser­vices for APA formatting

The HPU Library tab in Cam­pus Pipeline has a link for the APA Cita­tion Maker.

BibMe lets users search for arti­cles, books and other resources, and then it for­mats the entry. It seems to do a good job with books – just enter the ISBN num­ber, and BibMe cre­ates a cita­tion that can be copied into a document.

Here’s an exam­ple for a book I helped write a few years ago – the ISBN num­ber is 0782140815 and BibMe’s result is as follows:

Dulaney, E., Lane, P., & Sode­man, W. (2002). CIW: Foun­da­tions Study Guide. New York: Sybex.

Pretty close to the mark, I’d say. Remem­ber that you must select “APA” from the drop-down list, and then press “Down­load”, save the .RTF file and then open the file to see the formatting.

The IS 6100 text­book for 2007 has the ISBN 9780073511542 – and here’s BibMe’s result below.

O’Brien, J. (2006). Man­age­ment Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems. Guil­ford: Mcgraw-Hill College.

What’s wrong with this result? Plenty.

1. The pri­mary author’s name, as listed on the book itself, is James A. O’Brien.
2. The co-author’s name is miss­ing. George M. Marakas deserves some credit, after all.
3. The publisher’s name is not cor­rect. It’s McGraw-Hill Irwin.
4. The publisher’s city is not cor­rect: it should be Boston, not Guil­ford. Per­haps BibMe is retriev­ing the UK ver­sion of the text?
5. The pub­li­ca­tion date is 2008, not 2006.

So we need to edit BibMe’s sug­ges­tion as follows:

O’Brien, J. A. & Marakas, G. M. (2008). Man­age­ment Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems. Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

Even then, it’s still not for­mat­ted cor­rectly! Keep in mind that the above exam­ples are miss­ing their hang­ing indents.

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Microsoft Word tem­plates for APA formatting

There are sev­eral Word tem­plates avail­able that claim to do APA for­mat­ting. You can find sev­eral on Google. Most of the “free” tem­plates aren’t very good. Some of them may con­tain viruses and trojans.

One ben­e­fit is that these tem­plates have built-in styles to han­dle head­ings. Some tem­plates can also for­mat title pages and citations.

Some of my stu­dents like Per­rla. I haven’t tried it, but it appears to have a good fea­ture set.I use a Word tem­plate from Ref­er­ence Point Soft­ware. The tem­plate is very accu­rate, and it’s inex­pen­sive. No, I won’t send you a copy. I used to write soft­ware, and some­times a copy­right is a good thing to have.

I have seen stu­dents try to “bor­row” this prod­uct by copy­ing a DOC file from another stu­dent. (I like to check the File, Prop­er­ties dia­log to deter­mine who cre­ated the file.) All the stu­dents will get are the styles. Hey, you get what you pay for in this world.

The full ver­sion of the Ref­er­ence Point soft­ware is a tem­plate that adds APA menu choices to Word and Word­Per­fect. These menu choices can make the tem­plate much eas­ier to use.

The RPS online help sec­tion (Java required) includes instruc­tions for build­ing a Table of Con­tents, which is not dis­cussed in the APA man­ual, but is required for the final MSIS the­sis and grad­u­ate applied project papers.

Even the devel­op­ers of these tem­plates acknowl­edge there is no sub­sti­tute for the APA Pub­li­ca­tion Man­ual. After all, these com­pa­nies wouldn’t have a prod­uct if the man­ual wasn’t so widely used.

Also, it is always pos­si­ble for a user to over­ride or change the Word tem­plate set­tings, which may make the doc­u­ment non­com­pli­ant with APA standards.

The APA sells its own doc­u­ment for­mat­ting soft­ware, APA Style Helper. I have a report that the lat­est ver­sion works bet­ter than pre­vi­ous filter-based builds, but I haven’t tried this soft­ware myself.

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If you’ve made it this far down the page, and you read every­thing else, con­grat­u­la­tions to you. This doc­u­ment is a bit dry and crunchy, but it’s help­ful for my grad­u­ate students.

If you found this page on Google and you’ve never heard of APA style, you’re prob­a­bly look­ing for quotes from one of my favorite comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin on writing

• The pur­pose of writ­ing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure rea­son­ing, and inhibit clar­ity. With a lit­tle prac­tice, writ­ing can be an intim­i­dat­ing and impen­e­tra­ble fog!
• Verb­ing weirds language.
• That’s the whole prob­lem with sci­ence. You’ve got a bunch of empiri­cists try­ing to describe things of unimag­in­able wonder.
• If you do the job badly enough, some­times you don’t get asked to do it again.
• The only skills I have the patience to learn are those that have no real appli­ca­tion in life.

• Calvin: I’m a genius, but I’m a mis­un­der­stood genius.
  Hobbes: What’s mis­un­der­stood about you?
  Calvin: Nobody thinks I’m a genius.